Guild Wars 2

The delay has nothing to do with the fix. The fix, heavy handed as it is, was to add a strike component to reveal the thief. The delay is separate and seems completely unrelated to ghost thief or any other recognizable balance goal.

Yeah, hard to fix stealth stacking so they took a blunt force approach and hit a number of other builds in the process.

I like how they added a 1-second delay to thief traps and not to ranger or DH traps. I doubt this means thief traps will do significant damage now either to compensate.

Challenge modes exist for some content. I’d say that players can also choose to equip gear that isn’t as high quality to make certain content harder.

By the time you get to HoT and some other content ascended is assumed and the game can be harder even for people who are geared.

There is also difficulty based on knowledge of game mechanics but that is hard to balance around.

I’m enjoying it. Overall I don’t have as much time to play but 15/week has been manageable.

At this rate it takes a while to climb in the ranks but I’m progressing and should be able to reach my ideal MMR by the end up of the season.

Mostly I feel like the changes to mmr volatility have really helped keep people where they should be and that has made for better matches. This last weekend the matches I lost were mostly under 100 points. Another thing that is probably helping is the minimum game requirement isn’t padding the leaderboard.

People say population went down because there aren’t so many high ranks on the board…but part of that is because the game requirement limits people from getting on there without really playing. Many of those last season were likely not as good as the number suggests.

lol

What is “utility damage”? Is that even a thing?

1) Increase the rewards earned generally.

2) Give greater rewards to those at higher divisions relatively.

3) Give a choice of exclusive armor and weapon skins, through achievement system, after X games played in season and per spvp division reached.

Goal: increased rewards draws in new players. New players are incentivized to get better and earn higher rewards. Veteran players get better rewards and armor/weapon skins.

Also, provide better rewards in unranked while under spvp rank 20. This also is meant to draw in new (spvp wise) players to try it out.

Just so long as only the stealth component is unblockable and not the entire attack. Power creep is real and we shouldn’t add to it if we can help it.

I’d reduce block spam before adding unblockable personally. I’d also like to eliminate some of the projectile hate people can utilize through their weapon skills alone (engineer mainly) and massive healing people can put out without healing power.

But that requires an actual balance patch to nerf and not just buff things to try and fix it.

I’ll take taunt for 5000 Alex.

Only can have one out at a time. Also they are fairly small lines so the angle might have let thief stay hidden.

Too used to my play style for that :p

Also I don’t get as much time to play as I used to. Only benefit of long commutes is time to type on forums.

If you are NA would like to see the build in action though

How is your damage and kills? Top stats generally?

Now for the harder question:

What is it that kills you most often?

Any thief should be able to keep far decapped if no one is on it so that is less important imo. If they are trying to 3v1 you then that is good because they have let you manipulate them, well done :-D. The risk you face is one stays and the others just leave to help their team.

When it comes to killing do you always stay completely invisible or do you often come out of stealth to kill them? I think my reservations with the build have more to do with thinking it stays in stealth 100%. I just can’t imagine 100% uptime being helpful. If you are more like 75% uptime then the build starts to look more effective in my mind.

Yes.

Longer answer:

Anything like this is difficult even with just 9 options. You have to track performance on each class and then hope there are enough data points for all the players that the mmr is accurate. The total of games needed makes it hard to get accurate ratings in a shorter time period with fewer games played.

“Build” takes into account a lot of choices: amulets, traits, utilities, weapons, runes, and sigils. The more you include the more games are required under each to accurately rate you. Swapping a single point may be an improvement on an existing build or a completely different role (dps, sustain, etc). The game has no way of knowing which you intended so it has to redo your rank for your new build.

You could be allowed to mark your builds by role and have that factor into a class/build system without excessive complexity. That said, it relies on players to be good judges of what their build is meant to do. And, it ends up still requiring a lot of games on specific builds to accurately reflect your skill with it.

I feel like changing a base trait line to “elite” status would solve the issue because then you would have to pick b/w HoT or Core elite spec.

Like make Defense for warrior elite. Now zerkers can’t regen health like mad. It changes the choices you make and makes HoT specs more of a trade off than a bonus.

Drop your own traps.

How does the build perform role wise?

I run P/D, so similar to yours in terms of ranged pressure. Ghost thief can’t really do that and has to end up on point at some moment to drop traps. DH would hard counter the build with its own traps I’d imagine. That or a condi ranger using that spike trap.

Really if anyone has a video of ghost thief winning a match I’d like to see it.

I fought one in a match a week ago. It annoyed my team a bit but it couldn’t stand on point with all the other damage. It also wasn’t perma stealth at a few points so I did get the chance to spike it down a bit.

It tried to kill me (thief) and failed every time. Decent condi clear equals you can ignore it. There just isn’t enough pressure. DB thief puts up more of a fight and could use the same traps as ghost thief does to do damage.

Perma stealth takes initiative and thief can’t be mobile without it. Thief mobility is what the class brings most of to a match but ghost thief is slow because it doesn’t take elite spec and spends all its energy on staying invisible—in a game mode that requires visibility.

Non-meta is viable but you have to be able to fight the meta builds to pull it off. That involves just being a good player and understanding the other classes as well.

There are viable non-HoT warrior, Mesmer, thief, necro, engineer, etc builds.

Part of the issue is some classes had serious deficits prior to HoT that were solved with the elite spec. So of course the elite spec is necessary in those cases. But there are non HoT builds available where the survival and damage output weren’t overly changed by HoT elite specs. This depends on the build of course, even within classes that can avoid HoT some builds will be better with elites than not.

Thief used to have a condi cleanse issue. Now it has escapists absolution and dd is the better choice.

And you have 2.1k armor. Just about anything is going to do a lot of damage to you.

They are mistaken.

Given that I can’t understand you very well I’ll try to respond as best I can under the circumstances.

You seem to think that I think of MMR as a reward. I do not make that assumption. In an ideal system it is assumed both sides have an equal chance to win. A blowout match indicates that something went wrong with that assumption. A close match indicates that the mmr was fairly indicative of an even fight. In the middle are marginal cases (100-250 point differences) where it is hard to say composition and not player skill was the reason for the victory or the loss.

Players want to be at their true mmr. That is where the motivation comes from. There is no “reward” except for closer matches and fewer blowouts. Players need the system to be more accurate to increase the close matches. It makes the game feel less arbitrary in the long run.

Last, I disagree that we should all just accept the current system. Just saying it’s winner take all, so we should accept it as designed, is circular logic. The system is this way so the system should be that way. That isn’t an argument for keeping it that way.

Your logic appears to be that you want mmr to be winner take all, where match winners and losers are adjusted based on expected outcome and whether they happened to win or lose. Correct me if I’m wrong but from what I could understand your entire premise rests solely on liking winner take all as a system.

My suggestion is that instead of winner take all we reward competitive play by adjusting rating gain by the finer grain of distinction between a 500-1 victory and a 500-499 victory. Players would still gain and lose relative to the expected outcome (mmr disparity between teams) but not solely based on that. Obviously, I disagree that winner take all produces accurate or fun results.

Actually, a close game reduces the disparity under my suggestion. The 500-485 game gives -5 to winner and +5 to loser. Per the above mmr adjustment it becomes +10/-10 instead of +15 and -15.

Winner still gains and loser still loses, just less so.

Not sure I agree losing 500 to 0 means you shouldn’t lose ranking. If we want accurate matches then 500-0 requires some substantial adjustments.

Just about the only thing you can try to do with a bad team is push far and not take it but rather hope the enemy is stupid enough to chase you around the point with 2-3 players while your team figures out how to not die 4v2.

I agree with Cynz about the whole metabattle issue. People think that a build that doesn’t conform to the meta is somehow inferior, when it can accomplish some things that the meta isn’t capable of, and that is what makes it a good choice.

Running in solo queue I think the builds with the most flexibility as to roles are the most useful. You can get a lot of milage out of a support/dps/mobility character. Often I run into problems with teams that are nothing but support with no DPS or mobility. Then the other team with far greater flexibility just runs them over.

It might be dangerous to let a player self label their build…but I almost wish you could display a marker for the roles you can play on a particular class/build you are queuing with. At least if that was visible to teammates you could see that you have a problem or not with the composition of your team even if the class balance looks ok.

Here is an example of what I’m proposing.

Say under the current system a match results in an average MMR win-lose of +15/-15. The people on the team with higher MMR lose more per volatility or gain less per volatility—but the balance is overall roughly even.

Now lets look at what I proposed which is an MMR adjustment bonus for close and not so close matches. The bonus works by rewarding people who win by a lot or decreasing the loss of the people who lost by a small amount.

+15/-15 then is adjusted as follows:

+5 MMR for win >450 points
+3 MMR for win >350 points
+1 MMR for win >250 points
0 MMR adjust for win/loss 100-250 points
-1 MMR for win < 100 points
-3 MMR for win < 50 points
-5 MMR for win < 25 points

Reversed order for a loss perspective.

Matchup scenario 1: 504-434 (70 points: MMR adjust +/- 1)

Winners +14, Losers -14

Match up scenario 2: 500-325 (175 points: MMR adjust +/- 0)

Winners 15, Losers -15

Matchup scenario 3: 500-125 (375 points: MMR adjust +/- 3)

Winners 18, Losers -18

Matchup scenario 4: 500-225 (275 points: MMR adjust +/- 1)

Winners 16, Losers -16

Matchup scenario 5: 500-0 (500 points: MMR adjust +/- 5)

Winners 20, Losers -20

Venoms only synergize with visible enemies because only attacks that reveal trigger venom applications. A ghost thief gives up utility to have a venom and if running in a havoc group should honestly be running a different build to actually help the group.

Permastealth isn’t good for mobility which havoc needs to stay effective and alive.

Instead of gaining and losing mmr based solely on wins and losses, we should gain and lose mmr based on the difference between our final scores and our win/loss.

If you lose by a little it shows the match was close. If it is a blowout then obviously someone’s mmr needs to change. It also incentivizes people to fight to the end and not just give up.

If there is a reason to not do this I’d love to know it.

The “bottom” for volatility strikes me as too small given the change to prevent mmr manipulation.

At least in lower tier you can always contest far two or three v one. Then your team has good odds on beating them on mid/home.

I’ve been successful using it in the past in PvP and PvE and WvW. I’m not sure why you are so invested in telling other people they aren’t playing good builds when you don’t play those builds.

And it’s not personal. It’s just I’m tired of people talking about things they know little about.

For what purpose? Certainly it has high hp and armor but lacks damage in every sense.

The runes may be overkill with both dd and acro.

It will probably die to a good condi spike after you use a few cooldowns.

P/D is much better than ghost thief. Sure it got buffed but the traps can be used on p/d as well.

I also don’t have issues with using CnD but agree it isn’t as easy as it used to be.

Conditions have been viable to kill people for years. People also like to yell about them because Anet wants them to be viable. As yet power is still out shining condi on many classes so I’d expect more hate for condi as more builds become viable that use condi.

Condi hate has always been based on the design of cleanse in the game. Either a player is immune or dies quickly depending on how much cleanse they can/do equip. So when people face a good condi build without being able to cleanse it becomes oppressive in their mind.

Certain maps benefit from two thieves. Forest being one of them.

Thief just needs to make roles clear to the team and each other. If one is on decap duty then other thief is working on map mechanics and plus one as needed.

Thief can carry a close match but two thieves will snowball badly if the rest of the team can’t survive long enough to let the thieves work.

NA as well although many members are EU.

Unless they remove cleanse from the game no primary stat will reduce condi damage.

Cleanse is how it is balanced. A cleanse can negate between 0-100% of the damage from conditions. This means some are immune and some get hit full force. Part of cleanse is supposed to be about promoting active play—but there are a lot of passive cleanses as well so more often it actually is about promoting diverse build design. You can build more or less cleanse into a build through passive and active and reactive traits/utilities or you can choose not to.

I like cleanse because it makes the game more challenging from a theory crafting perspective. I could live in a post cleanse condi reduction world…but could you? Somehow I suspect the answer is no.

I’ve had moments where the opposing team decided to use map chat to tell us we were going to lose because I was a bad thief. We won that match.

Often people make assumptions where a thief should be without complete knowledge. I see a guardian camping their home I’m not going to try to decap that. Or they ping map to decap when I’m already there. Also they expect thief to cover both far and home at the same time and I am running back and forth recapping/decapping because they all want to just contest mid and die on mid.

Future contributions to this thread. Was mostly an FYI to anyone posting.

Shaogin.2679:

saerni.2584:

I like the second set of suggestions more than the first.

A suggestion for future balancing with these sigils would be to look at amulets like Deadshot with condi, vitality, expertise, and precision. An amulet like that was based on crit to trigger on crit sigils if I’m not mistaken. I would consider changing the precision to power to better reflect the removal of on crit sigils.

That would be a bad change as many condi classes have on crit traits that proc more conditions or needed effects, such as the Necro Plague Sending and Withered Precision and Engineer Barbed Precision and burn proc trait.

This is a fair point. The amulet certainly has that advantage for some classes. Sadly it makes a condi and condi duration amulet less appealing for anyone without condi crit traits. Ah well just a thought.

I may be able to help you out on the weekends as I’m in EST as well. Add me, send me in game mail and I’ll get back to you.

I like the second set of suggestions. The biggest change is removal of bloodlust type buffs which is fine because it reduces the inevitable snowball effect by a bit.

Removal of on crit is a bit of a nerf but I think a reduction in sustain that was promised will help balance it out. It may also be the cover for a larger sustain nerf generally.

They also cut the life stealing and healing sigils which will have a moderate negative effect on sustain as well. This isn’t terrible for us comparatively because as a lighter class we benefit least from regaining health compared to tankier targets (as far as sustain goes).

Mostly I was glad that condi duration remained in place because that has been my choices as far as sigils go.

Please refer to updated version in Sigil v2 thread.

I like the second set of suggestions more than the first.

A suggestion for future balancing with these sigils would be to look at amulets like Deadshot with condi, vitality, expertise, and precision. An amulet like that was based on crit to trigger on crit sigils if I’m not mistaken. I would consider changing the precision to power to better reflect the removal of on crit sigils.

Well I don’t use traps, I’m a P/D thief that uses kiting against some opponents. If they get close I can dodge away and leave them crippled.

You can see some random gameplay videos in my signature if you are curious about how it plays generally.

Too many people who insist a weapon set isn’t viable. Presumably because it isn’t in the meta. Sorry for mistaking you as one of them.

Caltrops on dodge is 3 possible stacks if enemy stands almost perfectly still for 3 seconds. Usually it is worth a couple of extra stacks of bleed in a real fight.

In PvE it can stack a lot more because monsters won’t move or have a big radius that means moving around won’t stop the caltrops from pulsing.

Unlike traps this skill and trait more specifically never revealed thieves. Orpheal needs to calm down and stop insisting everything ghost thieves use is OP. I use caltrops but I’m not perma stealth. So do many other thieves. It is a nice cc (cripple) and extra damage mechanic that helps me control my opponents positioning.

Anet already tracks this number for internal purposes. Most people would like to know how they stack up as X class. Anet can easily make that number visible to the player themselves and not use that number for matchmaking purposes.

This would be a simple quality of life change that allows players to know which class they play best, worst, and close to their average MMR.

The only unfair thing about condition damage is having to listen to people who don’t understand how it is balanced whine about it constantly.